Image: Wolfsonian-FIU, Miami
‘The Geneva Window: A Centenary Celebration’ is scheduled for Friday, October 9, 2026. The programme will begin with a talk by Clarke scholar Róisín Kennedy of University College Dublin, who will trace the window’s creation and controversial reception.
The event will also include Pioneer Winter Collective’s new performance ‘this beauty that will pass’, which responds to the window’s literary scenes and to its charged interplay of beauty, desire, censorship and impermanence. The performance is created and directed by Pioneer Winter and features Lisa Kusanagi, Laurah Merisier and Pioneer Winter, with costume design by Mr. Mostacho.
The programme frames the window’s history through the tension between state-sponsored art and creative expression. Clarke was an internationally renowned Irish artist commissioned in 1926 by the newly independent Irish Free State to create a window as a gift to the League of Nations in Geneva.
The completed window was rejected and labeled too provocative and “unrepresentative” of the Irish people. It was commissioned in 1926, completed in 1930 and never installed at the International Labor Building of the League of Nations in Geneva.
